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New Players Guide to Pubservers
This Document is supposed to help new users on pubservers, it is written for 2.0, but most of it should be true for later releases, too. Sorry for my bad english; if some native speaker wants to translate this from my English to good English, please go ahead :) I will divide this document in three Parts: Technical, Social and Strategy. There's also a good FAQ for more specific-Questions. And some questions are so extremely frequent, that you really should read the FAQ after reading this document. Technical Metaserver When you click Connect to Network Game you will see a list of servers with more or less useless information, that comes from the Metaserver. Every Freeciv-Server can announce itself to the Metaserver to attract users from all over the world. Users connect to the metaserver to see what servers are available, but most of the time, only the pubserver.freeciv.org-servers are available. Those are run by the freeciv-team and have good defaults for multiplayer, so its normally a good idea to connect to one of those. Server Name: Essentially it's the reverse DNS-Lookup of the server-IP. If it says pubserver.freeciv.org it's one of the official pubservers, if it says something else it's a private server. Port: Well, guess what - it's the port number of the server. If you hear "We'll meet on 5564" you're supposed to connect to the server with portnumber 5564 Version: Should match your version of freeciv, however, it maybe is possible to connect to servers of different minor versions. I.e. if you have 2.0.1 you can connect to a 2.0.2 server and vice versa. Status: That's the important one. If it says Running, the game has already started. If you want to play, you have to join a server, that says Pregame. Players: How many Nations are in that game. It does not show the number of connected players, as it also counts AIs. In pregame-games this is the number of connected players most of the time, though. Pregame In Pregame, you can meet with other people and change settings for the game. If you're new to freeciv online gaming, it's probably a good idea to let the experienced users set the options. The game will start when all users connected to pregame have pressed the start-button or have typed /start If you want to play a game, and all pregame-serves have 0 players, connect to one, and wait for some time. Sooner or later, someone will join too. Server commands There are many server commands, and a detailed help can be found by typing /help command. This is only a short list of important commands. /start if the server is in pregame, and everyone types /start, the game will start. /list Lists all players and the according connections. In Pregame you can see, who has not pressed /start yet /observe If a game has already started, this lets you observe the whole world /observe name This lets you observe a certain player. "Name" is not the connection name, but the name of the player, as listed in /list /take name If a player is AI, you can start playing for him with this command /end Will start a vote, that ends the game /vote yes/no Votes on the last vote that was cast. "/vote yes 12" votes for vote number 12. /score Will display a Score for each player, which is calculated by Population, Tech and Wonders /away Will set you to away-mode. AI will control your cities and defend them against attacks, but it won't start wars. Settings Game Types There are some different kinds of game-types: Normal Game If there is no game-type specified in the Servermessage, it might be a FFA (free-for-all) game, where you can use whatever strategy you want, form alliances and team up against other players. 3-City-Game You're not allowed to build more than 3 cities. There is a ruleset, that enforces that, so you can use the AI. You're allowed to team up and conquer others, but it is played with diplcost=100 most of the time. More information: 3-city-game Teamgame In a Team-game you are part of a team, that will be set in pregame. You can't leave that team, you share research and vision. It is very important to read the chat while playing, so you can communicate with your teammates. If you change your research, it will be changed for your teammates too, so you should try to agree what you want to research. Largepox There are two Servers with "Largepox"-Settings, namely fulltradesize and notradesize. Notradesize means, a city won't generate any research/gold at all, before it reaches that size, and fulltradesize means, that it will only generate reduced trade/research/gold before it grows to that size. Depending on how high those values are, it might be a good idea to use settlers to relocate population, in order to get one city bigger than notradesize as fast as possible Social Be nice to each other. The purpose of Freeciv is to have fun. We don't encourage crazy addicts (although they make the game all the more challenging). Always remember: it's just a game. Strategy There are two strategies: Killing everyone as fast as possible (which is called smallpox) and staying alive long enough to nuke everyone (which is called largepox). To be completed... Category:Gameplay